Here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.

This week’s timewaster might take a little more brain power than some of the other sites mentioned. But, who doesn’t love Scrabble?

But, rather than bugging friends and family to play while losing letter chips all over the house, Scrabulous is a Web site built for playing the game. It was launched in July 2006, and includes a Facebook version.

The Web site is free and allows people to play other players from around the world in real time. The site also offers a practice mode for playing by yourself or against a computer, along with options to save games and track statistics.

And, for all my fellow Scrabble nuts click here for the game’s history. Some fun facts:

• Alfred Butts invented the game’s first version — Lexico — in 1933 but the game did not take off until he added a board.
• Scrabble is sold in 121 countries and over 100 million sets of the game have been sold in 29 different languages.
• Butts began calculating the score of each letter by counting letters on the front page of the New York Times.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.